SAVVY Contemporary Gives The Bauhaus Wheels In A Mobile Exhibition Designed To School Us

In 2019, the centenary of the Bauhaus, a bus in the school’s likeness will travel between four global cities with the aim of challenging neocolonial power structures and “un-schooling” design perspectives.

‘Spinning Triangles’ is a project initiated by SAVVY Contemporary, a Berlin-based cultural center in which ‘Western art’ and ‘non-Western art’ are placed in a dialogue with one another. Over a period of ten months, the bus will travel to Dessau and Berlin in Germany, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Hong Kong. During this period, SAVVY Contemporary will host a series of workshops and symposiums aimed at the unlearning of colonial attitudes in design: “This school will not be developed by the geopolitical west, but through the accelerated movement between deeply interwoven places”, SAVVY explains.

Designed by Berlin-based architect Van Bo Le-Mentzel, the 15-square-meter ‘Wohnmaschine’—which translates from German to mean living house—has been created in the image of the workshop of the Bauhaus school in Dessau. Conceived by Walter Gropius 1919, the building was thought to embody the principles of the Bauhaus school and wider modernist movement. “We recognize the Bauhaus not only as a solution but also as a problem,” SAVVY explains, “and will propose a school of design that may well become an ‘un-school’”. The mobile version features the same gridded glass walls and famed Bauhaus signage. Inside, space has been divided into an exhibition and workshop area, along with a reading room that is appropriately lined with books that chart the history of the Bauhaus.

Find the program for the 10-month journey of ‘Spinning Triangles’here. Read more about SAVVY Contemporary, a “Laboratory of Form-Ideas”, in our interview with founder and curator Bonaventure Ndikung.